The Lazy Tour of Two Idle ApprenticesDickens, Charles
General
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
Dickens, Charles
Apprentices -- Fiction; Cumbria (England) -- Description and travel -- Fiction; Walking -- England -- Cumbria -- Fiction
Tuesday morning, at daybreak. A sudden rising, as it were out of the
earth, of all the obscene creatures, who sell ‘correct cards of the
races.’ They may have been coiled in corners, or sleeping on door-steps,
and, having all passed the night under the same set of circumstances, may
all want to circulate their blood at the same time; but, however that may
be, they spring into existence all at once and together, as though a new
Cadmus had sown a race-horse’s teeth. There is nobody up, to buy the
cards; but, the cards are madly cried. There is no patronage to quarrel
for; but, they madly quarrel and fight. Conspicuous among these hyænas,
as breakfast-time discloses, is a fearful creature in the general
semblance of a man: shaken off his next-to-no legs by drink and devilry,
bare-headed and bare-footed, with a great shock of hair like a horrible
broom, and nothing on him but a ragged pair of trousers and a pink
glazed-calico coat—made on him—so very tight that it is as evident that
he could never take it off, as that he never does. This hideous
apparition, inconceivably drunk, has a terrible power of making a
gong-like imitation of the braying of an ass: which feat requires that he
should lay his right jaw in his begrimed right paw, double himself up,
and shake his bray out of himself, with much staggering on his next-to-no
legs, and much twirling of his horrible broom, as if it were a mop. From
the present minute, when he comes in sight holding up his cards to the
windows, and hoarsely proposing purchase to My Lord, Your Excellency,
Colonel, the Noble Captain, and Your Honourable Worship—from the present
minute until the Grand Race-Week is finished, at all hours of the
morning, evening, day, and night, shall the town reverberate, at
capricious intervals, to the brays of this frightful animal the
Gong-donkey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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